Remote sensing systems, such as radar, sonar, lidar, and/or other ranging sensory systems, are often used to assist in general surveillance by producing data and/or imagery of the environment surrounding a stationary or mobile structure. In particular, a common radar system may be used to generate data and/or imagery representing mobile targets, weather features, surface features, and/or other targets associated with a particular area of interest that is being monitored by the system, and that data and/or imagery may be used to provide navigational alerts, determine various characteristics of the targets, and/or may be displayed to a user.
In general, targeting systems are configured to lock onto a target in a relatively small spatial area and to follow that target's trajectory as it moves relative to the system. By contrast, surveillance systems are typically configured to surveil as large an area as possible and are ideally able to determine characteristics of many different targets and/or types of targets with different trajectories, substantially simultaneously. For example, radar system surveillance installations are often required to scan across an entire azimuthal plane by rotating a radar antenna 360 degrees about a vertical axis, and such systems can detect a number of different targets all throughout the azimuthal plane. Conventionally, such systems must be rotated or scanned relatively slowly in order to provide sufficiently long illumination time on targets. Typically, long illumination times are required to detect characteristics of slow moving targets.
Slow scanning speeds are undesirable because they limit how often a position or other characteristic of a detected target is updated. Additional sensors/antennas or entire installations may be distributed across an area of interest to increase the overall effective update rate, but such systems are typically relatively expensive and can be difficult to manufacture, operate, and maintain. Thus, there is a need for an improved methodology to provide relatively fast updating remote sensing systems while maintaining or improving detection performance (e.g., time-on-target, minimal detectable velocity, and/or other performance measures), general accuracy, operational simplicity, and overall cost.